The level of cognitive engagement with presented information affects the way a person perceives and retains information. Cognitive engagement can be increased by increasing the effort required to read and understand the presented information, for example by using a harder-to-read font. With harder-to-read fonts more details are retained but tasks are perceived to be harder, longer or more arduous. There may also be medical reasons, such as dyslexia, which affect people's ability to read. Some fonts have been designed to aid the reading process for dyslexics.
It is common to alter the appearance of fonts for different people, for example increasing font size for the vision-impaired. An example of this is the service “iReminder.com Compliance for Life” that provides treatment reminders including customizable text according to wishes of the patient. Further, advances in technology such as gaze recognition may be used to provide a measure of reading speed, which may be linked to cognitive engagement.
Many patients do not comply fully with their care plan. This could be due to a number of reasons, which may include forgetting important information or perceiving required tasks as too arduous or inconvenient. Non-adherence to a medication regimen and/or other aspects of a care plan is accountable for a high percentage of healthcare readmission's costs. In order to increase adherence and compliance, several proposals have been made, from psychological profiling to automatic pill dispensers.
Non-compliance can be a result of a lack of knowledge how to comply correctly to a doctor's recommendations, due to an insufficient processing of information presented to a patient. A lack of sufficiently deep processing may result in an ability to appropriately encode the information in memory and recall it at a later moment. Lack of sufficient processing may result for example from a lack of attention of the patient, because the information is not perceived as interesting or a lack of effort from the patient's side because the task is perceived as too difficult. There is a need to present information to a person in such a way that deep processing of the information is stimulated, i.e. to improve the cognitive effort for processing the information which leads to a beneficial effect on the memory.
Munoz P, Giner P. and Gil M.: “Designing Context-Aware Interactions for Task-Based Applications” in: Daniel F. and Facca F. M.: “Current Trends in Web Engineering, ICWE 2010 Workshops”, July 2010, Springer, Heidelberg, pages 463-473, discloses an approach for integrating contextual information in task-based applications by considering simplicity as a major design goal is presented. In particular, a context-aware application is presented to support mobile workflows focusing the described solutions in three important factors to organize and manage tasks: priority, location and time. Following the simplicity guidelines, solutions are provided based on these factors by means of visualizations that allow users to complete their tasks fluently on the go.